Yesterday we had a look at some of the grammatical tricks you can use to make your descriptive writing sharper. Today, we’re going to look at the best way to handle detail. A common problem amateur writers have is trying to include too much detail in their descriptive passages.

The first rule is simple: don’t try to describe everything that’s going on. Your readers don’t need to know everything about the time, location, environment of an event or scene – they can imagine the details for themselves, or, more likely, simply focus on the action.

The point of descriptive writing isn’t to paint a detailed picture in your readers’ heads. It’s to give your readers enough detail so that they can use some imagination to paint their own picture from the information you give them.

One of the most famous openings to a novel is the introduction to Charles Dickens Bleak House. The style is old-fashioned and deeply unlike most modern web writing (168 words in a single paragraph – and that’s one of his short ones).

But Dickens is using imaginative description to hook his readers. And writing ‘hooky’ copy is just as valuable a skill today as it was in the 1850s. His new novels were sold in instalments, rather than as whole books. So Dickens - just like a copywriter or blogger - wanted to grip readers from the very start so they came back for more.

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Look at what Dickens is doing here. The actual location is established in just one word – ‘London’. He doesn’t try to describe the whole city at a particular time. He just gives us snapshots, many of which aren’t even full sentences – if you copy and paste the passage into MS Word the grammar checker goes crazy. Some of the details are tiny (‘flakes of soot’), but they’re all concrete and they all help us to build up an imaginative picture of the scene, or at least to get a sense of the atmosphere.

Think, for a moment, about what you ‘see’ in your head as you read a book. The chances are that you don’t establish a very detailed picture of what’s going on. Novelists don’t describe every detail of their characters’ clothing and appearance because they know it would take ages and their readers don’t need it – they can either fill it in for themselves, or (more likely) forget about what the characters look like altogether.

The reason for this is simple: the details of a description, however brilliant, are just background information. They’re vital for setting the scene and for grounding what you say in some sort of concrete experience. But descriptions of things are secondary to what readers are really interested in: descriptions of people, what they say and do, and how they interact.

Any journalist will tell you that people are primarily interested in other people. That’s why you’ll rarely find a news story, whatever medium it’s in, that isn’t presented with the ‘human angle’ at the front.

So how do you give your descriptions that human touch? A great way is let the people in them speak. So tomorrow, in the final instalment of this short series, we’re going to take a look at how to use dialogue to add sparkle to your descriptive writing.